A Bridge For The Future

As a former Windsorite, Winnipeg architecture professor Ian Macdonald was horrified recently when he saw a drawing of an ugly new suspension bridge over the Detroit River.

You might have seen his letter to the editor a few weeks ago, when he urged Windsor to demand something better than the hideous stick drawing he saw.

Macdonald, professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba, was mightily relieved when I contacted him and assured him the crude line drawing was just a generic image thrown out by promoters of the New International Trade Crossing.

But Prof. Macdonald’s letter and others to Detroit newspapers raise the question: now that it’s all but certain another bridge will be built, what SHOULD it look like?

It has to be iconic, people generally agree – which is just another word for “fabulous.” It has to make a statement about the two cities. We hope it impresses the world.

So I contacted Macdonald to ask for more, and I talked to his former employer in Windsor, architect Bill Kachmaryk. Together the two built a number of local landmarks in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, from the Harrow Research station to the addition to the Ontario Superior Court on Goyeau Street.

Macdonald says we should think carefully about what we want the NITC to say about us. The 82-year-old Ambassador Bridge is now “clearly dated” as a design. But it remains “an important symbol of Windsor and Detroit.”

Probably everybody in Windsor and Essex County agrees on that point: we want the bi-national authority charged with building the bridge to give us something great – not some ho-hum cheapo embarrassment.

Ontario Transport Minister Bob Chiarelli assured me when I asked him last week that Ottawa is as committed to making the bridge a “first class” project as the province was to making the Herb Gray Parkway a work of highway art.

“There is a determination to make it the best possible,” Chiarelli said, citing conversations with the feds. Good; that’s all we can ask.

Macdonald points to the 2003 Bunker Hill Bridge in Boston as one possibility of what the NITC could be. Designed by Swiss architect Leonard P. Zakim, it’s a hybrid of both concrete and steel. Its 10 lanes of traffic hang from steel pyramids.

Google the Bunker Hill Bridge and have a look. It’s interesting, but potentially polarizing. If they proposed it here a protest group would inevitably form. But it might not work here anyway – its 745-foot span is only half as long as the NITC will have to be.

Some well-meaning people keep pointing to various cool-looking bridges in the U.K. and the Netherlands as examples of what we should build here. But they won’t work on the Detroit River, either.

Most odd-ball bridges span very short distances and have low clearance. The NITC must span more than 1,400 feet and at least match the clearance of the Ambassador Bridge (152 feet) so that U.S. and Canadian warships can pass under it.

That pretty much limits our engineering options to either a suspension bridge or a cable-stayed structure like Boston’s, Kachmaryk says. No worries, though: “Some Spanish and Latin American architects have become geniuses at re-interpreting traditional bridge forms.

“If you’re looking for visionary, pie-in-the-sky stuff, I would see some form of a two level bridge,” Kachmaryk says – something that looks toward the future the way the beautiful Bloor Street Viaduct did when it opened in Toronto in 1918.

Toronto had no idea it was going to build a cross-town subway when it started building the viaduct in 1913. But somebody had the idea of leaving openings for trains within its arches, making it possible for subway lines to be installed half a century later.

Kachmaryk says the NITC design could also include built-in capacity for a second level of traffic: for high-speed passenger rail traffic, an “ideal” way to anticipate future potential.

“If you want to get people excited, that’s the route I’d go. Do you want to go through a rat hole (tunnel) or take the scenic route?”

We now know lighting must be a crucial part of any design, he says: the Ambassador Bridge didn’t come into its own until 35 years ago, when lights finally were added to accentuate the catenary curves of its suspended cables.

Kachmaryk cited one of my favourite bridges as a potential model: the Humber River bike trail bridge in Toronto, which has two delicately curving arches that suggest the St. Louis Gateway Arch. Two small highway bridges on the I-94 near Detroit Metro Airport are quite similar.

“There’s no reason why that couldn’t be blown up to handle traffic,” Kachmaryk says. Google it and see if you agree – and arm yourself for the coming debate.

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